Same Old Obama: The First Black Presidential Library and Gentrification on Chicago’s South Side

Here we are more than one and a half years into a racist white Republican presidency that owes its existence at least in part to Obama’s objectively white-supremacist demoralization and demobilization of the Black electorate (why bother to vote when even a “first Black president” couldn’t bother to help Black America?). Obama has been cashing in on his eight years of service to the nation’s predominantly white and unelected dictatorships of money and empire -- service he was able to provide from the White House thanks in no small part to his strategic use of Chicago’s Black South Side as the staging ground for his rise up the ladder of U.S. power and politics. He has entered the national oligarchy, moving into the ranks of the parasitic financial bourgeoisie that U.S. politicians serve, ape, and increasingly hope to enter after years of “public service.”

How richly appropriate is it, then, that he is now antagonizing Black South Side community activists with plans for an Obama Presidential Center that promises to appropriate longstanding cherished parkland in the city’s South Side Jackson Park -- one of Chicago’s great lakefront civic and common spaces -- and threatens to accelerate the racially displacing force of gentrification in and around the neighborhoods that Honolulu and Harvard Law’s Obama once called “home”? The Center is being rammed though over Black community and environmentalist protests by the Obama Foundation, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel (the vicious corporatist who served as Obama’s first White House chief of staff), and the racist “urban renewal” (Black removal) pioneer the University of Chicago.
“If Columbia University [where Obama got his bachelor’s degree in U.S. imperialist studies -- P.S.] had said they were taking 17 acres of Central Park for this,” the Chicago landscape activist Charles Birnbaum recently told Time magazine (see M. Rhodan, “Obama’s Rocky Return,”Time, “July 30,” 2018) “they’d be laughed out of New York. So why is this any different?”

Paul Street,
black agenda report.com